Category: Drug discovery
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Counting is Hard: You’d think we know how many people there are, but we don’t
One of the most basic ways to understand the world is to count something. Often, that’s easier said than done. A lot of my recent…
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Shingles Vaccine and Dementia: Good news, but only because we got lucky
Shingles, also known as herpes zoster, is a viral disease that causes a painful rash as well as pain and general malaise. There is a…
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Can Pharma Scale?
Pharma and tech are different industries. For example, tech benefits from network effects (if everyone uses LinkedIn it makes more sense to join), pharma doesn’t.…
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Pharma Ads
My wive and I had dinner at a noisy hot pot restaurant on Geary Boulevard. The restaurant was packed. When my wive went to get…
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Kári Stefánsson
None of the encounters I’ve had with Kári Stefánsson have been pleasant. I remember taking a walk with him in Heidelberg many years ago, when…
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Disappearing Polymorphs
Some chemical substances assemble in different crystal structures without changing their composition. Those alternative structures are called polymorphs. Polymorphs can act as seed crystals, causing…
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AI in Biology
AI will soon design effective and safe drugs for any ailment. At least that’s commonly assumed, and on the surface it’s a reasonable prediction. After…
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Our Biotech Future that Didn’t Happen
I once attended a week-long meeting in Heidelberg. The topic was Science and Society and the organizer was Sheila Jasanoff, an academic whose work focuses…
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Silent Night
This time of the year, everywhere you go, you hear Christmas songs. Some of them have been around for a long time. Silent Night was…
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Arsenic for Longevity
In an essay first published in 1877 in Waldheimat, Austrian writer Peter Rosegger describes his encounter with peasants in Styria using arsenic as an anti-aging…
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Madaus
A few years ago, my uncle gave me an old book created by the German pharmaceutical company Madaus, which is nowadays part of Rottapharm Biotech, to celebrate their…
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